Author Archives: Morgan Mussell

Says Who?

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This post is about judging ourselves negatively based on unexamined or under-examined beliefs.  What got me thinking in this direction was the recent exploration I did on ebook publishing.  I’m guessing that most unpublished writers long for the validation that acceptance for traditional publication confers:  “Now I am somebody!”  In fact, those ebook authors who have launched their careers by non-traditonal means have also done an end-run around our customary who’s-who assumptions.  New game, new rules.

I want to consider some of the ideas we use to bludgeon ourselves.  I’m not talking about (relatively) small issues:  I wish I had a nicer lawn. Nor am I considering such serious and potentially clinical issues as a pervasive, non-specific, feeling that I am just no good: I am not up to taking on original sin, in any of its many variations.

I’m talking about the dozens of ideas we or our friends have used to put ourselves down.  Reasons I am a loser:

  • Because I didn’t make the little league team.
  • Because I am dumb in math
  • Because girls think guys in the math club are nerds.
  • Because I’m not as pretty as my sister.
  • Because I didn’t get into my first choice college.
  • Because I don’t like my job.
  • Because I am not married.
  • Because my marriage is on the skids.
  • Because I don’t have any children.
  • Because the kids are out of control, which means I’m a terrible parent.
  • Because I got skipped over for a promotion.
  • Because I can’t handle my new job.
  • Because I got laid off.
  • Because I hate this town and want to live in (fill in the blank).
  • Because I can’t get get my book published
  • Because I want to be somebody.

Something in that list may bring to mind some past or present hot button issues.  Ideas like this can be incredibly painful, but interestingly, the moment our minds change, the issues and pain disappear.  We can see this by considering past ideas, the ones we no longer believe.  One day in grade school, I had a revelation:  I don’t really care about little league – I was just trying out because everyone else was. Instantly, all the inferiority vanished.  I was no longer a loser just because I wasn’t good at baseball.  Soon enough, however, new limiting ideas filled the void and I was a loser again.

That dynamic should make us very suspicious!

It made Cheri Huber suspicious.  Huber, a Zen teacher who is also versed in modern psychology, has made it one of her special missions to take on the voices of self-hate she finds so rampant in our culture.  Huber travels and teaches internationally, is a prolific author, has a regular radio talk show, and hosts workshops both online and at “The Zen Monastery Peace Center,” in Murphys, CA.  http://www.cherihuber.com/index.html

Huber is the author of twenty books, most of them published by “Keep It Simple,” an independent press she and her sangha founded back in the ’80’s.  Perhaps her most pervasive theme is contained in title of one of her most popular books:  There Is Nothing Wrong With You:  Going Beyond Self-Hate.  In the introduction, she writes:

Every spiritual path tells us that what we are seeking is inside us.  Society, the world, others, conditioning, teaches us as children to stop looking to ourselves in order to know what is so for us, and to begin to look to others in order to know what is right.  We first learn to look to parents, then teachers, then friends, lovers, husband or wife, children, Jesus or the Buddha or God – all “out there.”  The love, the acceptance, the approval is out there (emphasis added).

Huber sometimes uses the model of “sub-personalities,” to illustrate the origin of the self-hating voices.  Simplistically, sub-personalities are a series of “mini-me’s” living inside my psyche, with the power to take possession of my awareness from time to time.  Some of them hate me.  Some of them do nothing but whisper poisonous thoughts, and of these, Huber says:

You can listen to the voices that say there is something wrong with you.  It’s actually very helpful to be aware of them.  Just don’t believe them.  Most of what we have been taught to believe we had to be taught to believe because it isn’t true.  This is why children have to be conditioned so heavily!  We would never have reached these conclusions on our own!

I sat in a one day retreat with Cheri Huber in the summer of 2005, and got a sense of her deep commitment to this particular work.  It was clear from her comments that she had come from a starting place of crippling inferiority and lack of self worth.  She now seems like a joyous person, and one who believes her process is open to everyone, and judging by the numbers of people who threw themselves into the work that day, quite a few others have found it true for them.

As you learn to sit down, sit still and pay attention, you begin to glimpse that which sees through the illusion, beyond the voices of society’s conditioning, back to the original being.  And slowly that perceiving becomes more real than all you’ve been taught to believe…you begin to see with a much broader view…you begin to be the love, acceptance, and compassion you have always sought – Cheri Huber.


Read an eBook Week and Amazon in the News

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Read an Ebook Week

This is Read an Ebook Week according to Catana, whose blog, “Tracking the Words,” is dedicated to exploring and entering the world of ebook publishing.  Check out the article here:  http://writingcycle.wordpress.com/2011/03/06/read-an-e-book-week/

Among other things, you can find special freebees and offers on Smashwords this week (a permanent link is now on my Blogroll).

And in case anyone hasn’t checked, you do not need special hardware to read an ebook.  All the major sellers have free apps for pc’s, macs, smart phones and tablets, so this might be a good time to take a look.

Amazon the Tax Evader?

A scathing editorial in the Sacramento Bee this morning condemned Amazon for refusing to pay state sales tax, and threatening California based affiliates if the legislature forces their hand.  http://www.sacbee.com/2011/03/07/3454226/amazon-refuses-to-pay-its-share.html

Weren’t all online sales initially tax free?  After that I thought it had to do with whether or not a company has a brick and mortar presence in the state in question.  Now with so many states in dire financial circumstances, I’m sure it’s only a matter of time until every online purchase is taxed.

There seems a bit much hand-wringing in this editorial though.  Noting that the state deficit is $26.5 billion, and uncollected taxes from Amazon total $300 million, it’s a bit disingenuous to suggest we blame Amazon if there’s not a cop when we need one, or if a disabled family member can no longer get in-home care.

Still, there’s the issue of fairness, and the local paper quotes the Seattle Times:  Amazon is a giant. It has helped drive hundreds, and maybe thousands, of bookstores out of business. The Internet retail industry already has a cost-of-real-estate advantage over free-standing stores. It should not have a tax advantage as well.

Given that eventual taxation is inevitable, the statement that really interested me is that Amazon “helped drive hundreds, maybe thousands of bookstores out of business.”

I’m skeptical of this one, for several reasons.

1)  I can think of several towns, like San Luis Obispo, where it was big box brick and mortar stores, rather than Amazon, that drove the appealing Indies away.

2)  Businesses big and small that ignored the web, including Tower, which I loved, are going or gone, but lavish web sites do not seem necessary to survive and thrive.  I’ve bought several rare editions from mom and pop used bookstores, with simple small-business type web sites.  You could argue that Amazon is one of the two major venues (eBay being the other) that give such enterprises a place in the virtual mall to display their wares.

These certainly are rapidly changing times.  How do you feel about it?  Is Amazon an enemy of the little guy?  A champion of the little guy?  Both?  Neither?  Email if you want more space to voice an opinion than a comment allows.

Silence

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A busy couple of days:  not only a bit of  furious blogging, but finishing up three separate writing projects and reviewing manuscripts for two critique groups.

This morning I attended the California Writer’s Club monthly breakfast and talked with a retired psychiatrist about what’s broken in our mental health care system (hint:  a drug for all that ails you).

After breakfast I came home, and finding this week’s Time in the mailbox, read one of the lead articles, “Are America’s Best Days Behind Us?”

After that it was time for final proofing and submission of entries to two of the writing contests I’ve mentioned here.  The submissions are on their way, one electronically, one by snail mail.  I’ll have results (or lack thereof) in June and November respectively.

Finally – finally, it was time to brew a cup of coffee in my new French Press (which I am just starting to master), kick back, and enjoy one of life’s greatest luxuries – SILENCE.

Strangely enough, I realize I can’t really say what silence is. It isn’t just lack of noise; the yard guys came with their leaf-blowers, and though I do not enjoy the sound, it didn’t throw me out of inner stillness today (though it sometimes does).

Silence is not just about lack of thoughts, though it does seem to be about experiencing them as impersonal events, like the weather.

Inner silence is not just about meditation, though paradoxically, I would not have found a way to get there if I had not been looking for it in meditative disciplines for years and years and years.

I didn’t learn to find silence on a meditation cushion, but at work, among the cubicles.  I didn’t find it through some technique, but because I quit smoking and really missed the hourly time-out-from-everything I used to enjoy when I’d step outside every hour for a cigarette.

I missed those time-outs long after the nicotine was out of my system.  I took to going outside every hour for ten minutes, thought at first I just did a lot of inner whining as I watched other people light up.

Then, at some point, it simply happened:  I found my time-out mojo, my inner stillness.  For me, it has to do with listening.

I think anyone can find it, it’s really easy.  What happens when someone says, “Hey, listen, what’s that?”

Silence is what happens!   Thoughts and distractions return soon enough, so you listen again.  Distractions come, listen again.

Maybe sounds work best for me because they are not my dominant sense and I really have to pay attention.  Thinking of attention I remember a Zen story that goes something like this:

A student goes to the master and says, “Sir, what is the key to enlightenment?”

The master says, “Pay attention.”

A few moments later the student says, “I am paying attention.  What is the secret?”

“Pay attention.”

The student begins to get flustered.  “I am paying attention.  Are you going to tell me or not.”

“Yes.  Pay attention.”

You get it, and presumably the student got it eventually too – the doorway into one of life’s greatest luxuries.

Some Words About Smashwords.com

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My thanks to Brandon Halsey for pointing out a great oversight in my last post.  I completely neglected to mention smashwords.com, an increasingly popular site dedicated to publishing and distributing ebooks in all the popular formats:  Kindle, Nook, iBook, Sony, Stanza, as well as plain .html.

I don’t know a lot about Smashwords yet, but a place to start looking is this Q&A page by Mark Coker, the founder http://www.smashwords.com/about.

Another resource is Tracking the Words, the blog of Catana, a writer who posts almost daily about preparing for publication on Smashwords, and is now including reviews of titles they have published.  http://writingcycle.wordpress.com

Publication on Smashwords is free, but it’s worth looking at the “How to Publish” page to get clear that it isn’t easy.  Assuming your text is really ready, after numerous drafts and third-party checks for typos, the first requirements are outlined in the site formatting guide, which is checked electronically before a submission is accepted.  Apple iBooks have additional rules.  Then there’s a checklist for inclusion in the Smashwords Premium Catalog, which gets your book distributed to Sony, Barnes&Noble, Apple, Kobo, and (soon, they say) Amazon.

How about a catchy cover?  How about a one sentence tag line?  How about a compelling book-jacket blurb in case the title and cover are so compelling that someone stops to click on your title?  How about uploading a free short-story or novella, as some of the authors do, to encourage readers to search through their other titles?

Clearly, there is a lot of effort behind even the most stunning success stories, but I’ll end with an upbeat set of predictions for Indie publishing in 2011, made by Mark Coker in an interview on December 28, 2010.
http://www.mediabistro.com/galleycat/publishing-predictions-for-2011-from-smashwords_b18421

We are already seeing some of these predictions come true.  Here, for example, is one of them:

4. Self Publishing goes from option of last resort to option of first resort among unpublished authors – Most unpublished authors today still aspire to achieve the perceived credibility and blessing that comes with a professional book deal. Yet the cachet of traditional publishing is fading fast. Authors with finished manuscripts will grow impatient and resentful as they wait to be discovered by big publishers otherwise preoccupied with publishing celebrity drivel from Snooki, Justin Bieber and the Kardashians. Meanwhile, the break-out success of multiple indie author stars will grab headlines in 2011, forcing many unpublished authors off the sidelines. As unpublished authors bypass the slush pile, publishers lose first dibs on tomorrow’s future stars.

Writers Going Their Own Way in the eBook World

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Over the last month I’ve seen a flurry of articles on hugely successful ebook authors, and indications that their success is part of a wider trend.  In January, the month when Amazon announced that ebook sales had overtaken all forms of print volumes, 12 of their 20 ebook best-sellers in the horror genre were by self-published authors, in a field that included Stephen King.  http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/2011/01/guest-post-by-terri-reid.html

Twenty-six year old Amanda Hocking is the best selling ebook author on Amazon’s kindle store.  Since April, 2010, she has self-published nine ebooks and sells 100,000 a month, at prices ranging from $0.99 – $2.99.  Amazon’s pricing allows her to keep 70% of the profits, where traditional publishing would give her 30%.  http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2381193,00.asp

One of many articles on Amanda’s success quotes an anonymous publisher as saying there is no traditional publisher in the world right now that can offer Amanda Hocking terms that are better than what she’s currently getting, right now on the Kindle store, all on her own.  http://www.novelr.com/2011/02/27/rich-indie-writer

Terri Reid’s self-published ebooks are in Amazon’s top 20 lists for 10 different genres.  Her previous day-job included advertising and market research, and she references she some interesting discussions on the meaning of “ownership” and “value” in the digital age.  Everyone instinctively feels that an ebook is not worth as much as a paper copy and shops accordingly.  (One mathematician calculated the optimum price for ebooks as $2.99-$3.99).  Reid suggests that the traditional “agency model,” where the publisher sets the price is not going to work in this arena, and says, “Apparently Ken Follet’s publisher raised the price of his ebook from $7.99 to $9.99 and sales dropped 48%.“

Reid further claims that:  “Publishers were, and still are, trying to slow the growth of ebooks in order to protect their business model, which is built around selling paper.  How has that been working out for them?  Not very well.”  (I referenced Reid’s article in the first paragrah, but here it is again:  http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/2011/01/guest-post-by-terri-reid.html Note:  last night I downloaded Reid’s The Ghosts of New Orleans for $2.99 from Amazon and will review it here when I finish).

***

Not long ago – like maybe last year – traditional publishing offered writers a huge carrot – the certification of legitimacy.  USA Today reported that Hocking sold 450,000 ebooks in January, 2011, so I doubt that she worries too much about that.  http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/news/2011-02-09-ebooks09_ST_N.htm

For a traditional game with winners and losers to endure, winning has to be possible.  At the 2007 San Diego Writer’s Conference, I heard an editor of adult Sci-Fi/Fantasy explain that traditional publishers, with their “stable” of known authors who are guaranteed to sell, have no financial motivation to risk an unpublished writer.  “If you want to break into this market, your best bet is to get some short stories in print,” he said.

I heard the same thing at the CWC February lunch, from a prolific local author of romance and romantic suspense, Kimberley Van Meter – that increasingly, not just editors but agents too, are not willing to risk unpublished authors, no matter how good the work seems, and that was always the sustaining idea:  if I write something really really good, I will make it into print.

Let’s assume that is still true, and I hustle and get some short stories or articles in print, and then write something really really good and, dream come true, in a couple of years it’s on the shelf at Barnes and Noble. Then what happens?  I suspect that despite all the hype about “building your online platform,” Donald Maass is still correct – bestsellers happen by word of mouth.  How did you hear about Harry Potter or The DaVinci Code? Somebody I knew raved about the books in both cases.

That seems to be what happens with ebooks as well.  After writing her whole life, Amanda Hocking had tried the agent submission route with no success.  The self-described muppet enthusiast was broke, but wanted to attend a Jim Henson exhibit in Chicago in October 2010, so at this time last year, she told her roommate: “I’m going to sell books on Amazon through Kindle, and I bet I can make at least a couple hundred bucks by the end of the summer to go to Chicago.” http://amandahocking.blogspot.com/2010/08/epic-tale-of-how-it-all-happened.html.  She uploaded two books, sold 45 copies in two weeks, and thought that “wasn’t too shabby.”   In her case, the breakthrough came when she discovered book review blogs and asked the authors to consider her work.  Those digital voices launched her path to success.

Hocking writes young adult fantasy, and as word of her success spreads like wildfire online, you can almost hear the keystrokes of 10,000 writers hurrying to finish their vampire ebooks.  Everyone knows about gluts and bubbles from recent economics.  There’s not enough time to read all the good stories now (or separate the wheat from the chaff), and there will be even less as the ebook revolution kicks into gear.

Still, there is a democracy-loving part of me that loves this kind of populist development.  Different, but similar to they way I felt watching how cell phones and Twitter helped spark the revolution in Egypt, and how it made me feel to realize my own career in technology had, in however small a way, helped it happen.

These are exciting times to be a writer.  I’ll close with a quote from Joe Konrath (link in the first paragraph).  Konrath, a traditionally published author, was an early adaptor and advocate of epublishing, who writes:

The future isn’t Big 6 publishing houses vetting manuscripts, rejecting the majority, taking 18 months to publish, and then insisting upon ebooks with high prices and DRM, all the while paying authors one third of what the house makes. The future is smart, talented writers doing it on their own.

 

 

The Golden Raspberry Awards

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I enjoyed the Academy Awards on Sunday night. The nominations and the winners made sense.  On Monday morning, however, I read the rather sad story of a once-celebrated director’s fall from grace.

The night before the Oscars, the Golden Raspberry Foundation announced its Razzie awards for the “worst of” filmmaking in 2010.  Making a pretty complete sweep was M. Night Shyamalan, who was singled out as worst director of the worst movie, The Last Airbender, based on the worst screenplay, which he wrote.

Shyamalan wowed audiences and received six Oscar nominations, including Best Picture and Best Director in 1999,  for The Sixth Sense, starring Bruce Willis as a psychiatrist who, in the course of the movie, discovers he was murdered.  Willis plays opposite Haley Joel Osment, the boy who famously says, “I see dead people.”  The following year, Shyamalan worked with Willis again, and with Samuel L. Jackson, to make Unbreakable, which also received positive reviews.

The director’s career has gone downhill from there, both in terms of critical reviews, and in my own reaction to the two other movies of his I have seen.  What went wrong?

The next Shyamalan movie I saw, The Village, 2004, begins with an engaging premise:  the people in an isolated 19th century village live in fear of a race of beasts that roam the surrounding forest.  After a child dies, Lucius Hunt (Joaquin Phoenix) asks the village elders for permission to pass through the forest to “the towns” for medical supplies, but his request is denied.  The beasts paint the doors of village cabins with blood as a threat and warning after Lucius makes a short foray into the forest.

The beautiful Ivy Walker (Bryce Dallas Howard), blind daughter of the chief elder, becomes engaged to Lucius.  When he is stabbed by a rival, the prognosis is dire:  Lucius will die without medicine.  Ivy begs her father, Edward Walker (John Hurt), to allow her to go to the towns.  He agrees, against the wishes of the other elders.  Before she leaves, he reveals a secret:  the monsters do not exist.  They are a fabrication created by the elders to frighten children so they will not enter the forest.  Yet when Ivy ventures into the woods alone, a beast attacks her.

Ivy Walker and monster in The Village

So far so good. We are well into the movie and gripping our seats, but then, Shyamalan’s penchant for twists runs amok. Ivy manages to escape the beast, who turns out to be the boy who had stabbed Lucas, wearing a monster suit.  Ivy comes to a concrete wall, finds a handy ladder nearby, climbs up and over and winds up at the edge of a highway where a ranger in an SUV picks her up, looks at the list of needed medicine her father had written out, gets it for her (they have a bit of trouble), then helps her back over the wall with a warning to be careful.

We learn that the village elders are actually refugees from the culture of violence in America, who bet their lives and livelihoods on the grand experiment of trying to raise a peaceful generation in a peaceful agrarian culture.

You can check out the theme and logic behind the events at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Village_(2004_film), but from my perspective, these elements were buried in a flawed story, one that would never ever, ever, ever, ever – as in, no way – have gotten past the the two writing critique groups I sit with.  In other words, not even the least experienced among us would get away with the plot flaws that pepper Shyamalan’s screenplay.

That, I believe, is the key to the disappointing trend of this director’s movies.  He tries to do it all – write the screenplay and direct the movie, and his early success must have isolated him from, or deafened him to, the collaborative voices that could have asked questions that should have been posed before the first scene was shot.

Questions like why Ivy’s father, a seemingly decent and caring man, would let his blind daughter brave the woods and the modern world alone?  And if simple antibiotics could save his future son-in-law, the town golden boy, why wouldn’t he just go out and get some.  And no matter how large his personal fortunre, (see the wikipedia page), who on earth is going to believe he could have bought secrecy for an entire village?  We’re supposed to believe that Homeland Security hasn’t studied the satellite photos in a post 9/11 world?

Contemplating this set of Razzies, I was struck with a deep appreciation for the members of my critique groups and all of their comments – those that seem pertinent and those that don’t.  They help keep me honest.  These are not the “discouraging words” I mentioned in my previous post.

Discouraging words sound like this:  You can’t.

Good criticism from people who value each other’s efforts sounds very different:  You can, and here are some ideas on how to proceed.

What Do I Really Know?

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I’ve been very busy with writing lately, but in a one step forward, two steps back kind of way.  It has also been a time of discouraging words, to paraphrase “Home on the Range.”  Discouraging words about the never-so-crowded playing field for those trying to get into print.  Discouraging result (or lack thereof) from yet another writing contest I entered in the fall to no avail.  This is stuff I ordinarily blow off, but right now I’m in a doldrum phase in my novel.

**Doldrums** –  Popular name for the “intertropical convergence zone,” just north of the equator, where winds of the northern and southern latitudes combine, causing extended periods of light or non-existant breezes.  (When my writing hits the doldrums, I Google way too much!)

I picked up a hand full of early chapters of the book to review, but found I was still too close to do any kind of evaluation.  A mass of questions arose:  This seems okay but is that all is – just okay?  Is this still the story I want or need to tell?  Should I take an extended break to write some short stories?  Should I take a non-fiction break.  Would it help to just walk away for a while?

When questions like this bounce around my head, I think of a section of Jack Kornfield’s marvelous book, A Path With Heart.

After a traumatic event, a former student came to Kornfield in a state of great confusion.  Lot’s of well meaning people, each with some claim to spiritual expertise, had been giving her contradictory advice, and she didn’t know who to believe or which way to turn.

Kornfield told her the 2500 year old story of a group of well-meaning spiritual seekers who faced similar confusion.  The sought out the Buddha to ask his advice.  He told them to take no one’s word for the truth, not even his, but to test what they heard for themselves and see which teachings led to “welfare and happiness…virtue, honesty, loving-kindness, clarity, and freedom.”  Kornfield reminds us that “in his last words, the Buddha said we must be a lamp unto ourselves, we must find our own true way.” Based on this teaching, Kornfield posed a question to the woman:

I asked her to consider carefully what she actually knew herself.  If she put aside the Tibetan teachings, the Sufi teachings, the Christian mystical teachings, and looked in her own being and heart, what did she know that was so certain that even if Jesus and the Buddha were to sit in the same room and say, “No, it’s not,” she could look them straight in the eye and say, “Yes, it is.”

Through great good fortune, I know what that truth is for me in the spiritual realm – I’ve written about it, or around it, or hinted at it in the “No-Self” series I posted in November and early December.  What startled me and led to this post was the realization I do not know what the equivalent truth is for me in writing.  What do I know beyond what any expert may say?  What have I hammered out of my own experience?  What is “my own true way?” I’ve been mulling it over, and if I don’t know the truth, I’m pretty darn sure of a few things:

  • In writing as in living, my own true way seems most likely to manifest when the me gets out of the way, and that implies that the first thing necessary, the main thing to take a break from, is attention to results.
  • Whatever kind of writing it is, when it comes alive, it is surprising.  If I am writing honestly, I learn things about myself and about the world.  “Oh, I didn’t quite realize I felt that way, but I guess I do.”
  • On a spectacular day like this, in between winter storms, it’s time to get outside and breathe some fresh air.

Keeping an eye on truths like these, even if they are not quite eternal verities, may be enough to spark a breeze in the doldrums and get the ship moving again.

And The Winner Is: Some Excellent Oscar-Related Resources

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Here are some very neat Academy Award links for writers, thanks to the folks at the Gotham Writer’s Workshop, http://www.writingclasses.com/mailing.php?id=2008.  There are hoopla links to articles in Variety and the New York Times, links on books compiling the history (and “secret history”) of the Academy Awards, as well as info on Gotham’s online courses in screenwriting and writing for TV.  (Note:  I have not taken any of their courses so I cannot comment on them one way or another).

What I appreciated most is the list of Academy Award winning screenplays from 1928 to the present.  Quite a few have links to PDF files you can click on and study:  http://www.simplyscripts.com/oscar_winners.html.  Those who have followed this blog know I am a huge fan of screen-writing, and though I do not (yet) aspire to do it, I can think of few better places to study plot structure.

Speaking of which, I happened on a great quote on the difference between story and plot from E.M. Forster’s, Aspects of the Novel:

A story is a narrative of events arranged in their time sequence.  A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality.  “The king died, and then the queen died” is a story.  “The king died and the queen died of grief” is a plot.

I’ll be out of town for much of Sunday, but I hope to make it back in time for the awards.  This year in particular, I’m interested in some of the movies, writers and actors.